Page 94 of To Wed the Wrong Sister

He would look up when she came around the corner. He always did. She had not been keeping count, but she was fairly certain he looked up every time, with an alertness that she was learning to recognize as a thing he did specifically for her.

A particular quality of attention that he brought to her presence; he was not performing it but because it was real. He would look at her the way he had been looking at her since the evening in her parents' drawing room, with nothing between the look and its meaning, and she would feel it in the way she always felt it now, fully and without bracing against it.

She had spent a long time bracing. She was done with that.

The carriage rolled on through the spring morning, past the last of the London streets and out into the opening country, the hedgerows coming into leaf along the road, the fields pale green and new. She kept her eyes on them and let herself be simply a woman going home, to a husband who was waiting for her, in a garden they were going to build together.

She thought she could live with that.

She thought she could live with it for a very long time indeed.

THE END?